Spiral Knighs Review

New game from Three Rings

A couple days ago I was looking on vgreleases.com for any cool titles that came out recently that I was unaware of. I came across "Spiral Knights", and what immediately caught my eye was that this game was created by "Three Rings", the same company who created "Puzzle Pirates". I have been a big fan of this series, and have spent many hours over past summers puzzling my way through the high seas. The only thing that has kept me away from the game is the monthy fee in order to get many of the really good features in that game. Spiral Knights however, is completely free. You have access to all of the features of the game without ever having ot pay anything...EVER* (I'll get back to this later)!The main idea of the game is that the Spiral Knights' spaceship crash landed on an alien planet. In order to leave the planet they have discovered that they must battle their way through deep caverns filled with enemies to reach the core, where they will be able to get materials to repair their craft. Basically, its an action rpg dungeon crawler, in which the focus is mainly grabbing loot and powering up your character's weapons. The cool thing is that each time you venture into the dungeons, the path is almost never the same. Paths consist of levels that are named by the types of enemies they contain. So one level may be full of slime enemies, while the next will be full of robots. Each type of enemy drops different materials, so its important to know what mateirals you need in order to make your next weapon or armor item. So basically its a fun hack and slash with an item creation system.

Hack, slash, repeat! As you can see the game is very colorful.

Now you must be thinking, "what's the catch?". Game companies are not going to put thousands of hours of development time into a game that they give away for free! Well, that's where the little star above the "EVER" comes in. Like popular ad campaigns, I did this to denote some missing information, aka sort of a catch :) This game uses an energy system. Everytime you do something such as move down to the next dungeon, or recover after dying, it requires using energy (usually 10 to go to the next dungeon, 2, 4, or 8 to revive yourself). You start off with 100 energy, so its not so bad, because this is usually enough to get you through a pretty long sitting unless you're dying all of the time. Now if your energy gets to 0, you can't explore any more levels, and you have to log off and wait until your energy regenerates over time, back to 100 (your max free energy). However, here's where the money comes in. If you want more energy you can buy it using real world money at a conversion rate of 3500 energy for $9.95. Howver, there's also a way to buy energy using the in game coins that you pick up on monsters, at a current conversion rate of 3415 crowns to 100 energy, so if you're really despirate, you can buy it this way.

This guy obviously bought some energy.

The only big problem I have with this game which will probably make me lose interest pretty quickly is that there are no quests. The only reason you're going into these dungeons is to collect materials so that you can forge better equipment, so that you can go deeper into the dungeons, so that you can collect better materials, so that you can forge better equipment......you get the idea? I can sum this up in one geeky section of pseudocode, for those of you who program:

Ok now that I've geeked out, let me just finish by saying right now the game is fun, but I know that if they don't include something like quests to keep people entertained, it will most likely lose people's interest after awhile. Luckily, Three Rings is known for their incremental updates. Puzzle Pirates today contains many, many more in game activities that it did when it first came out. So, until that happens, happy slashing!